Tradition/Innovation: American Masterpieces of Southern Craft & Traditional Art by South Arts (review)

The South is home to many traditional arts that families and communities continue to practice today. These visual arts, typically utilitarian, are usually deeply rooted, reflect a community aesthetic, and have experienced only modest change over time. Contemporary craft in the South, in comparison, also possesses its own rich history beginning with the folk school movement in the early 1900s, and has grown in range of expression with each individual artist. Artists have been, and continue to be, drawn to this region to learn and practice their chosen artforms. Throughout the exhibit you will find both parallels and contrasts in the lives and works of contemporary craftspeople and traditional artists.

— Tradition/Innovation: American Masterpieces of Southern Craft & Traditional Art[exhibition notes]

Tradition/Innovation: American Masterpieces of Southern Craft & Traditional Artwas a traveling exhibition of both traditional and innovative contemporary works of craft that were created by 58 artists who reside in South Arts’ nine partner states. The exhibition was curated by Jean McLaughlin and Kathleen Mundell. The artists themselves assisted in the selection of the individual works that were exhibited. The works in the exhibition dated from the 1970s through 2007, the year the exhibit checklist was finalized. The exhibition toured to a single venue in each of South Arts’ nine member states. The average exhibition period per venue was approximately six weeks. The exhibition opened its tour on March 1, 2008, at The Atlanta History Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and closed on December 19, 2010, at the Historic Train Depot in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It also traveled to The Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee; The Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, North Carolina; The Kentucky Museum of Arts and Craft, Louisville, Kentucky; The Pensacola Museum of Art, Pensacola, Florida; The Sumter County Gallery of Art in Sumter, South Carolina; The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama; and The Louisiana Art & Science Museum, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The four thematic divisions of the exhibition were cultural practice, relationship to place, innovation and evolution, and connections. In addition, the selected works represented seven basic crafts media or work processes: basketry, book arts, clay, fiber arts, glass, metal, and wood. Among the more than two dozen traditional artists whose work was selected for inclusion in the exhibition were National Heritage Fellowship recipients Jerry Brown, a potter from Hamilton, Alabama; Mozell Benson, a quilter from Waverly, Alabama; Vernon Owens, a potter from Seagrove, North Carolina; and the late Philip Simmons, an ornamental iron-worker from Charleston, South Carolina.

At the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University in Alabama, the exhibition occupied one end of the main museum foyer and two of the museum’s major gallery spaces. A large signature graphic rendering of the exhibition title introduced and identified the entrance to the exhibition within the museum foyer. Every work in the exhibition was accompanied by an identifying label delineating the object’s maker, the maker’s place of residence, the object’s title, its year of creation, and the basic material or materials from which the object was made. Larger individual labels interspersed throughout the exhibition featured each artist’s name, a photographic image of the artist, a listing of his or her craft specialty, and a short statement about, or a quote from, the artist. Larger text panels were placed at intervals throughout the installation to explain or define such subjects as contemporary craft processes vs. traditional workways, the effects of cultural traditions on individual creative activities and forms, the processes of continuity and change in cultural traditions, and other pertinent aspects of both traditional and innovative craft processes. Large sculptural...